The Closter

The road ahead of them is covered in gravel. Not fresh gravel, not the kind that is laid down with intention and care, but old gravel, churned and displaced, the kind that has been spat out from underneath the previous location where the cluster was stretched across the ground before it moved on. It crackles under their feet with a sound that is both hollow and definitive. Scattered throughout it are chunks of matter that should not be there, objects that do not belong to roads or to gravel, remnants of something that was once organised and purposeful, now broken into pieces so small and so numerous that they have ceased to mean anything individually. There is surprise buried in all of it. There always is.

The only thing for certain in this world is death. Selim thinks about this often, more often than he thinks about food or shelter or the particular angle of the sun at particular times of day. Death on the throne of spiritual conversion. That is how he has come to understand it. Something entryput in the thoughts of the Clieun team, seeded there long before any of the current arrangements came into being. The only thing the Clieun people understand, the only thing they have built their entire system of meaning around, is the sense of foreboding toward the MEGALMEN. This is the most important ideological drive of the common body of Clieun. It is not a religion exactly, though it functions like one. It is not a philosophy exactly, though it borrows the language of one. It is simply the organising principle of everything they do and everything they refuse to do.

The WEIL-HIS tribe do not embrace death the way that normal people would accept it. What they prefer is the sense of permanence. The idea that they work towards something lasting, even if that something is vague, even if the direction is unclear, even if the working itself is aimless and repetitive and leads nowhere visible. But naturally, really. There is a naturalness to it that Selim has stopped questioning. You stop questioning the things that are simply there, the way you stop questioning the colour of a wall you have looked at for long enough.

Selim is convinced of all of this. He has been convinced of it for long enough that the conviction no longer feels like conviction. It feels like knowledge. It feels like the kind of thing you do not need to argue for because it simply is, the way the gravel simply is, the way the dead weight of the buried SHUPA-Qs simply is.

Dragoj has no theory. Not about any of it. He is done with philosophy. He is done with ideas about surviving in the larger sense, the sense that involves meaning and framework and the correct way to interpret the world. All Dragoj is interested in is the resumption of normality. He says the word often. Normality. He says it the way other people say the name of a place they want to get back to, a specific city, a specific street, a window they remember looking out of. Normality. As though it is a location. As though it is somewhere you could point to on a map if only someone would give you a map.

Selim has started to find this exhausting in a way he cannot fully articulate. What kind of normality, he thinks, is this when you are not able to pursue your daily habits. What kind of normality is this if you are concerned about your own safety first and then, secondly, the safety of the rest of the people who surround you. This is not normality. This is something else entirely, something for which the language has not yet caught up, something that requires a new word or perhaps simply requires silence.

Outside the SHUPA quarters, the WEIL-HIS soldiers, or the engineer siblings as some call them, are building. They are building well and they are building high. They have been building for as long as Selim can remember being here, which is long enough that he has stopped being able to imagine the structure without its additions, the way you cannot remember a face before it aged. They are adding on top of the brickwork exteriors a series of cage-like framed steel bars. The bars are electrified. They are ready to go live. They will be notorious, when they do, for the rest of the people contained within the enclosed clusters. Selim knows this because he has been paying attention. That is his particular problem and his particular gift. He pays attention when it would be easier not to.

Selim has become used to it. Not comfortable, but used to it, which is a different thing entirely. A person can become used to almost anything if the alternative is not becoming used to it. His daily routine is made out of three things. The first is getting his neck to stop tightening, which involves the cigars, the particular ritual of them, the lighting and the waiting and the slow release of smoke that his body has come to require the way other bodies require water or movement or the sound of another voice. The second is the laps, the round-the-block walk he does each morning, the same route, the same sequence of corners, the same pause at the same point where the gravel gives way to something that was once pavement. The third is the reading. Although the reading is running out now. He managed to finish all of the Muriel Spark works, every one of them, and the warden would not provide any other literature. In particular, he had asked for James Peterson works. They refused to have anything to do with that. They would not authorise any such work. Let alone anything in the science-fiction category, or anything of a conspicuous nature, anything that might suggest a world other than the one currently being administered.

They have become tired of his many requests. There is an injunction now against further requests, because the system cannot tolerate further demands. This is how it was explained to him, in writing, in the particular dry language that systems use when they have decided something and want you to understand that the decision is final.

'Since when have I demanded anything?' he would exclaim, to no one in particular, to the walls of the SHUPA quarters, to the particular quality of the air inside a room that is five metres by five metres and has been lived in for a long time. 'I have always been very polite about it. Always nicely.' He would end his complaints with that word. Nicely. As though the manner of the asking was the thing that should have made the difference. As though politeness was a currency that could be exchanged for books.

For Dragoj, the rest of the day is something else. He moves through it differently. He is conveying interests without the pipe-network of the MEGALMEN, which means he is moving through the day without the underlying structure that gives the day its shape. He envisages a life, when he speaks about it at all, that is completely immersed in the trenches that NIGELOS serves. As it is known. As it is understood by those who have been inside it long enough. NIGELOS as home. NIGELOS as the thing that serves you, that organises the serving, that makes the serving feel like something other than what it is.

His head has become bigger. Not physically, or not only physically, but in the way that the head of a person becomes bigger when it has been inside itself for too long without sufficient contact with the outside. His lips, by contrast, do not work the way they used to. There is a disconnection between what is happening inside and what comes out. He is home-bound and prone to bouts of long sleep that last for periods that cannot be described as normal sleep, that cross over into something more like absence, something more like the body deciding to be elsewhere for a while since the place it is in offers it very little.

Selim is quite regularly amused by Dragoj. Not in a cruel way. In the way that you are amused by someone whose relationship to reality is so different from your own that it produces a kind of wonder in you, a kind of helpless appreciation for the variety of ways a human being can arrange themselves in relation to the facts. They both live in the SHUPA quarters, which is to say they share a room that is five metres by five metres, which has a timer built into it that measures and calculates every human behaviour by the second. Every movement. Every change in breath rate. Every stillness that lasts beyond a certain threshold. And it is a very consistent meaning tool. It is the kind of thing that you need to make a decision about before it opens up to you, before you understand what it is asking of you. A living limited edition of the type of INSTA-OILS moon. How the hell can a claustrophobic human live in there. This is a question Selim asks himself and does not answer.

It is not easy to imagine the existence of a claustrophobic elvo in these conditions. Someone of the over-active type, someone who consistently needs to head out and go for his daily walks, his long necessary walks that are not about exercise or destination but about the simple requirement of being outside and moving. The problem with such a person, in these conditions, is that the CODE-XPEER runs out. The CODE-XPEER is a bluish-to-green liquid contained inside a glazed vertical bottle. It drops and drips every time the lock-code of the SHUPA-Q is activated. Every exit. Every entrance. Every time the seal is broken and remade. This means that the running off of the C-XPEER will produce another problem on top of all the existing problems. The story that everyone knows, the story that is told to new arrivals in the clusters, is that if the C-XPEER runs out whilst you are inside the SHUPA-Q, then that is it. That is the end of the specific chapter you are in.

The liveable block slips under, unseen, into the unseen, and is buried. Nobody watches it happen. Nobody marks it. It takes up to a day for the SHUPA-Q to complete the burial, to take itself and potentially the humans inside it down into the ground, into the rocky, compacted, indifferent earth beneath everything. There is no ceremony around this. There is no sound that anyone on the outside can hear. One day the SHUPA-Q is there and the next day there is gravel where it was and the gravel does not remember.

When you zoom out and see a much wider angle of the CLOSTOR, the full picture that you cannot see from inside it, you see that out of two billion SHUPA-Qs, two thirds of them are already buried. Two thirds of the entire system. Less than a billion remain above ground, untouched, still conscious, still running their timers and their C-XPEER bottles and their populations of exhausted inhabitants. Selim and Dragoj are holders of one of these remaining SHUPA-Qs. This posits a terrible problem. Not a metaphorical problem. A concrete, ticking, liquid problem contained in a glazed vertical bottle mounted beside the door.

Dragoj has not arrived at the point of giving a fuck about this. Selim knows that Dragoj has not arrived at this point because he has been watching him, because watching is what Selim does when he cannot read and cannot walk and cannot smoke and cannot sleep. He watches. He had paid a lot of attention to instructions and guidance over the nine months they have been together in this space, the nine months that Selim privately thinks of as the closest quarters of his life, and in all that time, across all those days and nights and the particular quality of silence that a five by five metre room produces when two people inside it have stopped talking, Selim had not once managed to turn over a million burials in his mind without arriving at the same conclusion. They were all gone. Every one of them. They had all vanished, disappeared off the face of the earth in the most literal way that phrase has ever been used.

Selim is clearly very much traumatised by this knowledge. He does not know much better than what he knows now, which is to say that the knowledge has not led anywhere useful, has not produced a plan or a resolution or even a satisfying despair. It has simply settled into him the way sediment settles, slowly, without drama, changing the composition of the thing it settles into. He is tempted, regularly, to switch Dragoj off from his particular mode of living and just bring him back to a sense of reality. To shake him. To make him see.

But his fear is that he might, just by accident, just by pushing in the wrong direction at the wrong moment, trigger some kind of consequential attack from Dragoj. Not a physical attack necessarily. Something worse. Some kind of final retreat into the interior from which there would be no return.

He decides instead to tap him on the shoulder. Gently. The way you tap someone who is sleeping and whom you do not want to frighten. He asks him to listen carefully for what he is about to say.

Dragoj, surprisingly enough, listens.

'No. I do not believe this malarky,' he responds, immediately, without pause, without the pretence of having considered the information.

Selim feels that he is not being taken seriously. He feels this the way you feel something that you already knew was going to happen, with a tiredness that is almost indistinguishable from acceptance.

He tries another thing. To see if Dragoj can be made to become convinced through evidence rather than argument, he unlocks the SHUPA-Q, steps outside into the gravel and the particular quality of the outside air, and asks Dragoj to nip out and see it for himself. The bottle. The dripping. The slow diminishment of the liquid that is keeping them above ground.

Dragoj, innocently, steps outside. He stands in the gravel with his larger head and his uncooperative lips and he looks at the things Selim is showing him. Selim shows him the drips coming out of the C-XPEER. The steady, indifferent, rhythmic drips. Dragoj does not react.

'You see,' Selim says, keeping his voice as level as he is able, 'this dripping is a constant event. It happens every single time we open the fucking thing. Every time. Without exception.'

Dragoj looks at him with the expression of a person who has heard a fact and found it insufficient. The expression of someone waiting to be told why the fact matters, why the fact connects to anything else, why the fact should produce in him any particular feeling or any particular course of action.

'So what are you telling me?' Selim says, because he knows Dragoj will not ask it himself, because Dragoj has learned to wait for Selim to provide both the information and the framing of the information and sometimes even the appropriate response to the information. 'What I am telling you is that every drip is almost like a moment in our lives. Every single one. Once the liquid is gone and we are locked inside, we are finished. This thing begins burying. Deep down into the ground. Into this rocky, unforgiving piece of earth that does not care about us even slightly.'

After a moment of silence, a silence that Selim cannot quite read, Dragoj says that what they should do, on that count, is stop going out. Simply stop exiting. Ensure that they do not get locked into the second sequence.

'Simple,' he says.

'I mean,' Dragoj continues, warming now to the logistics of the thing, 'we could do a division of labour type of arrangement. I could monitor the liquid dynamics. Watch the bottle. Keep track of the level. Whereas you would just continue doing your thing and keep tapping me on the shoulder to inform me of anything relevant.' He adds this last part as though it is a generous concession, as though the offer of being tapped on the shoulder is something Selim should be grateful for.

Selim's face becomes very still. It becomes the kind of still that a face becomes when the person behind it is no longer engaging with what is in front of them but has moved into a space that is somewhere else entirely. He watches Dragoj. He waits. He waits until Dragoj turns his attention back to the bottle, to the vertical cylinder of bluish-to-green liquid, to the drips that are and have always been the central fact of their situation.

And then, very quickly, without announcement, without farewell, Selim steps back inside the SHUPA-Q and pulls the door shut behind him.